Jiangshi X: Unedited Audio & Notes

Manga Details

• Japanese: Kyone-shee X

  • Kyonshi is the Japanese term for our hopping vampire friends. It’s also the term for them with which I’m most familiar since I grew up with the NES game Phantom Fighter that used the Japanese term for them.

• Chinese: Chyahng-shee X

• Norihiko Kurazono

  • Notable people they were an assistant for

    • Hiroyuki Kikuta on HORIZON (rugby series)

    • Katsutoshi Kawai on Monkey Turn (hydroplane racing series)

    • Kei Kawano on Yuuto (speed skating series written by Yumi Hotta, of Hikaru no Go fame)

    • Mizuki Kawashita on Hatsukoi Limited (romance series that is somehow a flop despite having an anime)

    • Kosuke Iijima on Obo Samba!! (gag series about monks)

  • Notable people they had as assistants

    • Yoichiro Tanabe (of Oshiete! Furedou Wanda-san fame)

  • Other works

    • Magic Peddler Roma (2009-2011, 5 vols, Sunday Super)

    • Hocus Pocus (2011-2012, 2 vols, Comic Flapper)

    • Rin Mishima Doesn’t Believe It! (2011-2013, 3 vols, Comic Dengeki Daioh)

    • Voyage au Centre de la Terre (2015-2017, 4 vols, Monthly Comic Beam) based on the Jules Verne novel of the same name

      • That’s right, Journey to the Centre of the Earth in this adaptation of the popular classic. As with most Beam novel adaptations it’s about being faithful and making it look cool, and does these two things.

    • Automaton (2018-2020, 5 vols, Morning Two)

    • Liber -Heterogeneous Criminal Investigation Unit- (2019-2020, 3 vols, LINE manga)

    • Across the Moon River (2024-present, 1+ vols, Manga One/Ura Sunday)

      • Kurazono’s newest series, following a bunch of teens as they get caught up in a science fiction adventure involving government conspiracy and also the moon.

• Publishing

  • Run Dates: 

    • January 23, 2023 to February 19, 2024

• Chapters/Volumes: 

  • 35 chapters/4 volumes

About the Manga

• Plot

  •  Let’s get this out of the way: Jiangshi are Chinese vampires. They have numbers on their head which rank their power level and the strong ones are sealed with strips of paper on their foreheads. They often wear fancy hats. Anyway Xiaohu is training to be a Daoshi, a guy who fights Jiangshi, with his buddies Chaoyun and Jiuli. Xiaohu is the strong one whose adoptive dad, Longhu, is the leader, or dad-aoshi. Longhu saved him when he was a little kid when his parents died so he’s got a sick scar that reminds him to feel hatred every morning. Also he has a kitty. Jiuli is the nerd with glasses, and Chaoyun is Naruto. It’s their last day of training and they gotta fight a level 2 Jiangshi. But oh no Chaoyun’s arm gets hurt and the two others decide to help him leave which would make them fail. It turns out that was the true exam though so they all pass. 

  • Soon however their village is under attack by a group of evil Daoshi called the Wu Dao Jiu Dao oh no! And they planted a stick that seals everyone’s spirit energy bummer dude! Longhu dies and the three kids manage to escape with Lady Jiutian Xuannu. The bad guys want her because she can unseal the Shei Li who are the super powerful Jiangshi. They travel through the desert to find the Baguadaoshi, AKA the strongest Daoshi. Chaoyun breaks his arm and they tell him to go home which he doesn’t want to do because his little sister is paralyzed and he wants to heal her so Lady Jiutian heals him. After Xiaohu defeats a level 4 Daoshi using a piece of paper his dad gave him imbued with his spirit energy, they’re saved by the Baguadaoshi so they can have a training arc where they all get stands. A time skip happens and it’s now Jianshi X Shippuden. 

  • They all decide to go take back their village where the bad guys have begun unsealing the super powerful Jiangshi. Everyone is impressed by how the 3 kids have become strong. Jiuli uses his smarts to fuse with his stand and kill bad guys and Chaoyun just finally gets his arm chopped off to kill a bad guy. Xiaohu’s stand is actually the white tiger from Chinese mythology that gains power by eating Xiaohu’s lifespan. He fights against a bad guy who unsealed an ultra powerful Shei Li. Xiaohu gives most of his lifespan to become a cool tiger guy, but it’s not enough. He starts to give the rest of it when OH MY GOD IT’S HIS DAD WITH THE STEEL CHAIR! Longhu wasn’t really dead this whole time so he beats up the bad guy who now fused with the Shei Li and then Lady Jiutian seals him away. Then some time passes and they gotta go on a trip restore Xiaohu’s lifespan and do something important at a mountain and also Chaoyun has a cool sword arm now.

• Characters

  •   Xaiohu

    • Monk in training

    • Cat man

    • Dad’s hokage

    • Takes his dad's final hamon

  • Chaoyun

    • Hothead

    • Wants to be the mc

    • Arm is owie

    • Has sick sister or something 

  • Jiuli

    • Quiet one

    • Has glasses so he's smart hurhur

    • Series doesn't bother to give him a backstory 

  • Lady Jiutian Xuannu

    • Weirdly endowed for some reason?

    • Healing magic how convenient 

Why it Failed

• This is Naruto

• Why would they be hired to do dumb shit as their first mission 

• This is some hard to grasp vocabulary

• Chapter 2 Bruh you literally were asked if an animal did this and then said no human did this ok well an animal still could have 

• The problem with this doing mission structures is that the entire thing feels very forced and status quo filling 

• Gotta love the bad guys always being evil 

• I thought they could fight a level 2, why are they struggling so much against it

• The tier system is so lazy like have their rank equal to intelligence or something and not just better stats

• You can just pile on how bad this is, generic characters, clearly evil villains with bad motivation, 

• There is nothing in this series except jiangshi

• Oops almost had a hard situation but nope magic bird from dad fixed it!

• There's like no consequences everything works out no matter the risk

• Why is he having motivation flashbacks of the guy who betrayed his village?

• Oh a hot headed girl crazy never saw

• Oh great an abrupt training arc

• So we just really never learned anything about the world

• I don't understand what's going on with the timeskip, so did he get the bath water and pass the independent study challenge?

• I'm disappointed by the designs like you can't just tell level by looking 

• Constantly interrupting things with flashbacks I think that's how the author thinks good writing works

• Did they really establish the power system at all?

• Why is most of the fighting between humans

What it Did Well

• David: And before we get into what we think it did well, if you’ve been enjoying the show we’d really appreciate it if you subscribed to the Shonen Flop Youtube! We’re trying to hit our goal of 1500 YouTube subs and if we hit it we’ll do a special bonus episode on the Build King Epilogue. If you’re already subscribed, thanks so much!

• Art is fine, has some cool splash pages like the candles in chapter 3

• Chinese culture is rare to see in manga

• The unexpected color page was cool

• Some of the out of their league fights were cool vs level 2s

• Necromancy was cool, wish we saw more of them controlling them

Where it Could Have Gone

• Why did they swap the teacher character?

• Be tonally darker than Naruto have consequences 

• Imagine it was all about beating the nepotism allegations 

• They said common people can take on level 1s let's actually see the common folks do stuff 

• Absolutely have them failed and banished in the first chapter and then they learn o see how common folks live

• What if it was from Jiuli’s perspective and he's like how do I control my idiot sons

• Show more of the alchemy stuff it seemed like a cool thing to show magic tool creation 

• Play up the survivor regret, Jiuli still kicking himself for not warning sooner

• Play up the nature elements vs the man made draculas

Misc Thoughts

•  Zha paper pacifies them imagine if it was za paper and they just gave em pizza 

• Why is wood and wind together in the key guys

• Why is there an extra thicc jiangshi

• Do the stands do anything or just look cool 

• It reminds me of beyblade spirts

• Wait boobies?

• From Tucker: Note about the official English translation:

  • The way character names, place names, attack names, and all other manner of proper nouns appearing in the manga are presented is significantly different in the original Japanese text versus the official Viz English translation. In Japanese, names and terms are presented in kanji, the character set adapted by Japanese from China in ancient times. Japanese readers of Jiangshi X (or as it’s known in Japanese, Kyonshi X) read these names using modern Japanese readings for the kanji

  • However, in the English version, these kanji characters are instead interpreted as their native Chinese (most likely standard Mandarin/Han) equivalent written out in pinyin (romanized Chinese pronunciation). These different interpretations of the same symbols make pretty much everything sound very, very different depending on which version you’re reading and also means that there is no single correct answer for how one should refer to just about anything in this series. Wouldn’t want to make our jobs easy, huh?

• Maxy Bee thoughts:

  • I don’t have much for this one, the manga is just a Naruto clone in a lot of ways, but I do want to note that the author has been in the industry over 20 years between assistant work and their own series, with no real hits to their name, despite working for several publishers and under some hit-making authors in his time. That’s just… pretty sad.

    • His Jules Verne manga is pretty good though. 

Final Verdict

• Six Word summary

  • Community

    • Tucker: Translate it into English, not Mandarin!

    • Chickenwarlord: Emotional stakes? Makes me hopping meh.

    • dackerson: Exorcist patent expired, got generic version

    • Diego: Exorcist manga? Localized entirely within jump?

    • duderocks: BWould rather count rice before rereading

    • FunkyGreenOverdrive: Complaint 117? What about Order 66? | Dear Jump: NO MORE EXORCIST MANGA!

    • Gene Shalit: Hop, don't walk, to the bookstore!

    • Kpt.Kluless: Juniors Xorcise jiangshi xtremly justly extraordinarily

    • LordAnubis: Oops! All exorcist manga for Jump

    • Luffy0321: Made to show off character designs

    • Portal man: oh great, another GODDAMN exorcist manga!

    • Resident Warhammer Nerd: mistook it for choujin X instead

    • Sbubby: Liked it better as Jiangshi Twitter

    • Scott: Stale, straightforward fantasy with no twists.

    • Spike: This Jiangshi should have stayed dead

    • T-Wolfwood: The most painfully generic Exorcist manga

    • Ty: Manifest spirits? Manifest a good story

    • Watchtower: Even exorcist manga get Chinese bootlegs

    • Xylon: What if Naruto were the zombies?

    • Ylissean: Jiangshi Xorcised itself from the magazine

  • David: this series’s a piece of Jiang-shit  | This was Jojo this whole time? | A vampire series without any stakes

  • Jordan: the translator had an easy time